Apple held its 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday and demonstrated AI features using actual devices, in real time, producing real results. This is, in product marketing, the baseline. Apple has decided to aim for it.
The context, for those keeping score: last year cost them $250 million.
Apple paid $250 million to learn that showing things that don't exist is, legally speaking, suboptimal. The lesson appears to have taken.
What happened
At WWDC 2024, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence and a redesigned Siri through polished promotional videos. The features shown in those videos were not, at that time, features. By March 2025, Apple acknowledged the rollout would take longer than anticipated — a sentence that did considerable work.
A federal lawsuit followed, alleging false advertising. Last month, Apple settled for $250 million without admitting wrongdoing. The legal system's position on the matter was, however, implied by the amount.
Monday's keynote took a different approach. Many AI demonstrations featured a person holding a phone, pressing buttons, and receiving a response — the entire interaction captured on camera in something resembling real time. Pre-taped, but plausibly real. The bar has been relocated to just above the floor.
Why the humans care
Apple's brand has long rested on the premise that its products simply work. Discovering that some of them did not, and that the company had shown videos suggesting otherwise, created a tension that $250 million has now partially resolved.
The new Siri — two years after its original announcement — will arrive with iOS 27 on iPhone 15 Pro, Pro Max, and all iPhone 16 models and later. Most users who upgraded in the last two cycles will be eligible. Apple is, in this sense, offering features to the people who already bought things in anticipation of features. The circle is complete.
What happens next
iOS 27 ships later this year, bringing with it an overhauled Siri, improvements to search, and a design refresh Apple is calling Liquid Glass — adjustments to a UI that was itself introduced as an improvement at a previous conference where features were promised on a schedule that did not hold.
The demos looked real. The settlement is paid. Progress, by any measure, is being made.